Maeve Brennan - The Visitor

Their voices clattered loudly into her sleep. The grandmother advanced across the floor and Katharine crowded behind her. She jumped up and confronted them with a timid smile of welcome. Their faces were depressed and cross. Even Katharine seemed abstracted, as she took Mrs King’s hat and then her coat. She shook the coat out and laid it over her arm, and thoughtfully stuck the long hatpins side by side into the band of the hat.

“I’ll get you a cup of tea, ma’am,” she said with doleful matter-of-factness, and went out at once. Mrs King sat stiffly down in her chair and glanced at Anastasia.

“Well. So now you won’t even go pay your respects to our dead friend, God rest her. Our only friend, who would have given her right arm to help any one of us.”

“I couldn’t go, Grandma. I didn’t think you’d mind.”

She met a smile of irritation.

“The number of times I’ve heard your mother say just that. ‘I didn’t think you’d mind.’ ”

She changed the subject with a change in her voice. “To get back to our conversation of last night, Anastasia. About your going. I’ve asked Katharine to get out your suitcases. I’ve written to the bank about money arrangements. And I’ve written to the Mother Superior at the convent to expect a visit from you in the near future. If you don’t want to go to a hotel, you can stay with them till you get the flat opened. I have also written to a Mrs Drumm, a very old friend of mine, to keep an eye on you. She has your address and so on. I suppose you have all the keys.”

“Yes, I have them,” said Anastasia hopelessly.

“Don’t look at me as though you were being condemned to death, child. The sooner you get this over with, the better for all of us.”

She gazed at her with impatient pity and annoyance.

Anastasia stammered, “You really do want to be rid of me, don’t you?”

“Oh, now, now, now.”

She plucked nervously at her long skirt and stood up. Katharine came in with the tea. Mrs King spoke sharply to her.

“I’ll drink it upstairs in my room, Katharine. I’d like to lie down for an hour.”

Katharine glanced at them with alarmed curiosity and backed out.

“Oh, Grandma, Grandma, I’m the only one you have. I don’t want to go.”

“We can do without that, Anastasia.”

Anastasia found herself looking at the shut door. Her hands held each other in a strong and comfortless grip, and they had grown large.

“Shame on you!” she called out loudly. “Oh, shame on you!”

There was a suitcase flat on the floor under the wardrobe in her room and she rushed upstairs and pulled it out and began to lift things into it.

Katharine came to the door and went away. At once Mrs King came, shutting the door behind her and looked concernedly about.

“Katharine told me you were packing to go,” she said. “There’s no need for this. There’s no need for all this rush, Anastasia. Now take your time and come and have something to eat. Let the packing wait till tomorrow. Come, now, Anastasia, speak to your grandmother.”

Anastasia straightened from packing and looked at her.

“Ah, yes,” she said absently. “Off I go.”

Mrs King looked distraught. She picked up a pair of gloves lying in an open drawer of the dressing table and looked at them. She took the photograph of the father from the dressing table and surveyed it.

“This was taken in his last year at university,” she said mournfully, with an eye on Anastasia.

“I have to leave,” said Anastasia. “It might as well be now.”

“Have you enough money?”

“Yes.”

At the door the grandmother turned, uncertain.

“Well, then,” she said. “You’ll wait till tomorrow morning.”

“No. I’ll go when I have this bag packed. Katharine can send the other things later.”

As soon as she was alone again, Anastasia felt a sudden surge of anger that left her shaking with spite. Oh, shame on her! she thought. Shame on her! I have no one to stand up for me.

Tears of self-pity started to her eyes.

Off I go.

The suitcase was hard to manage. Katharine came rushing up the stairs to meet her and help her. Katharine was crying but saying nothing.

She bade her grandmother goodbye, where she had come out to stand watching by the sitting-room door, near the hat stand and the hall chair. The grandmother pressed her arm as they kissed, and thrust an envelope of money into her hand.

“Here,” she whispered. “God bless you.”

She looked strange, senile with emotion, with some distress. Anastasia was full of tears, so that her face pained with the effort of holding them. Katharine had the suitcase. There was a taxicab waiting, and Katharine placed the bag in, clumsily, and closed the door and bent her face to the window. Her face was streaming with tears, and anguished. She had her apron on and the cuffs of her dress were rolled back.

“Goodbye, pet, goodbye. God bless you and keep you. Goodbye, now. Goodbye.”

Anastasia nodded wonderingly at her and drove off.

The driver said, “Station?”

“No. The Murray Hotel.”

“Oh, I guessed it was to the station you were going,” he said mildly.

It was a five-minute drive to the hotel. She used the time to think things through, the clerk and what she would say to him. The driver carried her bag inside and she paid him. She went to the front desk.

“Is Mrs Dolores Kinsella here?” she asked.

The clerk foraged around at the books in front of him.

“No Kinsella at all here, Miss.”

“Oh, dear,” she said in humourous distress. “I’ll wait for her then. She said she’d be here about this time.”

She sat down and looked around her. It was pleasant to rest. She thought of how she had allowed herself to be thrust from her house without a single protest, without one angry word. How easy she had made it for them. She thought, I am not very clever. People can get away with anything.

She had been sitting about ten minutes when she got up and approached the clerk again. He turned to her with a smile.

“She seems to be very late,” said Anastasia. “I was going on the mail boat with her.”

He glanced efficiently at the clock.

“You have plenty of time. You can catch the late train.”

“We were supposed to meet some friends. We thought we’d go on an early train,” said Anastasia worriedly.

Now he grew concerned.

“That leaves you very little time. But I’m sure she’ll be along soon.”

She nodded at her suitcase.

“Will you watch that for me? I have an errand to do, and if Mrs Kinsella isn’t back by the time I return, I’ll go on without her. I won’t be long.”

He nodded in satisfaction at her decision.

She walked composedly out into the street and turned in the direction of Noon Square. She walked without haste. She thought ahead, methodically, to the station, and the boat train, and the boat. Continuing to walk, she opened her purse and searched for the keys to the Paris flat. They were all there, along with the key to her grandmother’s house. Everything was in order. She cleared her throat a couple of times.

She walked more slowly as she came to the house, examining it as one might examine a house that had been shuttered for a long time. The steps going up like that to the front door made her sick with longing, to run quick up, and in, and up to her own room with its own view of the meager, dreaming garden.

It was time for tea, once more, the last time. One of the sitting-room windows was wide open. She stared eagerly up at the black open window and immediately was filled with fear that they would close it first. She fancied she heard a noise up there, and thought of them talking unsuspectingly, Mrs King sitting, Katharine standing, the two of them lost in lifeless discussion, perhaps talking of her by the fire. Comfortable and quiet they are, if sad. How little they know what they will do.